Born in 1982 in Jinzhou in Liaoning Province, Yan Heng studied within the Oil Painting Department at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in China. He currently lives and works in Beijing. Inaugurating the artist’s first personal exhibition in the West, “La Botanique du rêve” , Sator Gallery, in Paris, presents different series of works with oil on canvas to which he combines three dimensional objects and incorporates into installations.
The paintings of Yan Heng are figurative and narrative, products of his own experiences as well as the collective metaphors of contemporary Chinese society. His representations of the body and his introspective approach are illustrative of a new pictorial tendency within Chinese art. The work of Yan Heng derives its sources from daily life. He takes lived reality as his starting point, transforming it and pushing it toward a surreality which evades direct readings. Incorporating into his work objects of fantasy and appropriation, he takes ideological and social emblems from China during the second half of the 20th century (a car reserved for political dignitaries, a sculpture of Lenin) and merges them with symbols and icons of the new consumer society (a washing machine, a computer key- board and monitor, an image of Michael Jackson).
Intertwining the lived, personal experiences of the artist with his observations of the society of his contemporaries, arising from both individual and collective memory, his work resembles a dreamlike exploration, an animated and unfinished dialogue be- tween reason and the thoughts of poetic imagination.
Private opening in the presence of the artist september 6th 6-9pm
